Pick me a Winkle

Prompted by a weird text from my friend Linda who admitted to having eaten a frog and squid in her life (yeuk!), I just wondered what was the strangest thing or combination of foods you've ever eaten? Despite having eaten frog and squid, Linda baulks at the idea of eating snail. Well I haven't eaten frog which she says tastes not unlike chicken and I had squid once and thought it extremely tough and rubbery and have never touched it since.

As a kid however, I have had winkles. 

Winkles? Now I don't know if this is an English delicacy or a Yorkshire delicacy in particular, but winkles are a little mollusc which lives on seashore rocks and they graze on algae so they do do us a favour. They are quite small and look like a tiny snail - here's a picture:

They are generally boiled, sold in small paper bags and then we prized the meat out of the shell with a pin. There are all sorts of unkind things said about them - that they look like huge bogies (out of your nose) but although small, they were quite tasty.

Now, I'm not a faddy eater but I don't experiment with food too much although I don't mind trying new things that come along now and then.

Again, as a kid, I used to eat strawberry jam and Cheddar cheese sandwiches. Now I loved them, but some people think that's odd. I've heard of pregnant women being addicted to all sorts of strange foods including coal!

And my final confession is when I was a teenager, I used to smoke (shame on me - something I really regret although I did give up over  30 years ago) cinnamon sticks that we bought from the chemist. Bloody disgusting now I look back, but a lot of people who were not well off used to smoke all sorts of rubbish including my dear departed friend Jack who even smoked dried privet leaves and other concoctions from his garden clippings and was heartily sick as a consequence.

So here's the question - what's the strangest thing or combination of things you've ever eaten?

Chat soon

Ta-ra!